A female albatross over 70 years old
lemonde.fr
lemonde.fr
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_(albatross)
Simply remarkable.
> Even as they age, most bird species lack physical signs of getting old—their beaks don’t wrinkle, and their feathers don’t thin out or go gray. “Usually, you can't tell the bird is old just by looking at it,” says Kenn Kaufman, field editor for Audubon magazine. “In a few birds, they'll start to develop more white feathers in the plumage around the head, like a person's hair turning white, but that's not a common thing.” Unless a bird is banded, it’s hard to know its age.
> However, birds still go through the aging process. “The dogma in the field for many years was they don't really age, they just die,” Austad says. “But everybody that has studied them intensively can see some signs of them aging.”
https://www.audubon.org/news/why-birds-are-anti-aging-supers...
As an interesting aside, even if humans didn’t age, our expected lifespan is still on the order of several centuries due to fatal accidents.
But imagine skills of those bright people who pushed boundaries of mankind into better places, if they could contribute for say 500 years. Like in Tolkien's world elves attained great mastery ie in smithing over millennia of experience.
In any case it would be horrible for mankind, because there is no shortage of Putins and Stalins in general population and they would burn whole world to the ground without blinking an eye to get closer to immortality. No, thank you, death is a great thing for us even if individually most of us are shit scared of it, and various religions trying to tackle this certainly don't help as much as people would like.
Accidental death as being cited here is certainly one, but also predation, disease, and intentional killing or maiming that leads to death from other organisms competing for the same resources, whether that be humans waging war, male oxen fighting for breeding rights, lions killing hyenas and cheetahs to maintain dominance over hunting territory, or plants that strangle out other plants to hoard scarce sunlight.
There are also plenty of animals that more or less die on purpose to make way for the next generation. A fair number of insects are designed to only ever go through one breeding cycle, including some that don't even have mouths because they come into adult form with the energy they need to reproduce and no more and that's all they'll ever get. The giant octopus spends a season fattening up so she can stay in the nest tending to her clutch while all of her eggs mature, never leaving and starving to death as she does so.
Life on the larger scale depends upon individuals themselves continually being born and dying to maintain the level of dynamic adaptability that allows life to flourish as local ecosystems and the planet at large change. A programmed maximum lifespan via aging is only one of many ways that happens.
The universe does not give a fuck about your appreciation, it cares (a little, little bit) about your carbon footprint, or you leaving the animals alone. They already have it quite difficult.
Evolution is a term we've used to describe a naturally occurring, largely random process. Animals get random mutations; if it causes that animal to be more likely to have successful offspring, you will tend to see more offspring with that mutation.
Animals already have it quite hard without humans interfering. OP wants to bring even more interference to their habitats. There is also all the pollution.
Also evolution gives the nature meaning, not "human appreciation" as written just two posts above.
Did you know that albatrosses have a higher heart rate while resting on the beach than while flying? That’s because they take advantage of an aerobatic technique called “dynamic soaring” which extracts energy from the ambient wind conditions and converts it to kinetic energy! (This is opposed to static soaring, which you typically see in vultures exploiting a solar thermal. The big difference between dynamic vs. static soaring is the direction of lift. Static is up so it’s easy. Dynamic is to the side so it’s harder.) It’s a sort of perpetual motion machine that albatrosses have developed evolutionarily. This is what enables them to fly enormous distances across the Pacific Ocean; they are able to not only conserve energy while flying, but they produce it as well! Amazing!
Final point, misinterpretations of “the rhyme of the ancient mariner” have given albatrosses a terrible name. In the story, it’s not the albatross that gives the mariner bad luck; it’s the fact he killed it. The albatross was a harbinger of good luck. In fact, the albatross arrived when the wind did not because it brought the wind, but because it followed it (the wind gradient over the sea is what enables dynamic soaring). “An albatross around your neck” is not a judgement of the albatross, but the killing of it. But somehow the albatross gets the bad name? Come on!
Even if flying takes very little effort as described, why would the resting heart rate be higher?
But it’s not even that flying takes little effort, it’s that it takes no effort. The bird does not use any of its own potential energy for flight, it extracts it from the wind gradient over the ocean in the course of flying, and turns it into kinetic energy. It would tire too quickly otherwise, and would be unable to make the transpacific journey to breeding grounds.
Can we really believe in the science, without considering the possibility of flawed humanity in the equation? Eg scientists have visited Midway Atoll for at least 70 years. The scientists managing the tags are not known to us, but we can assume that it is not just one scientist.
In all those years could one of those scientists made an error? Could one have even intentionally sought this sort of fame, on behalf of the species that they will have invested so much time going to visit etc? All it would take is to mislabel a few tags - sticking the same number on younger birds and who would know the difference?
These lies could even be justified altruistically - by making these wonderful birds appear to also be the most long-lived, one would raise their profile and with that increase the funding that becomes available to help them (and the researchers that monitor them). Alternatively, there is the possibility that some people simply have a 'loose screw', or see a potential benefit from lying.
Put simply, I don't know if this story is true - I'm not assuming it to be so. As for any claim, I do see reasons why it could be orchestrated, and I don't have any evidence for why it should be taken on trust.
And even if that's true, in the wiki it also says that wisdom may have taken another mate.
Other than the band, do we keep track of dna or some other bio marker to make sure someone didn't just move band on some other Albatross?
Also keep in mind that these are wild animals, so life expectancy rules of stone age humans would be the only thing similar (i.e high child mortality, minor injuries can kill you etc.).
Finally, the article also mentions that her tag has been replaced six times. So, there may be older tagged birds. But if they lose their tag once, they become young animals again. Which would skew any statistic.
How important these tags are for estimating bird life expectancy? If they are, isn't this going to cause, like, typically updating the Bayesian priors towards less longevity than they actually have? I'm not working in this field at all, so I'm guessing there are methods in use to counter this?
If you can ever take a whale watching or bird watching boat trip, do it. Theres a lot of really cool sea birds that only live far out at sea.